The Finnish Freeride Magazine

Nordic Hooligans: Making of Video

Making of Video

Welcome to the Nordic Hooligans blog! This is the space where we will share all the good and the bad stuff that we experience in the making of this movie. We´re gonna post “making of” videos, pictures and feelings as often as possible during the winter and the all the way to the premiere next fall. We´ve been busy with pre-production and planning, trying to put all the necessary pieces together before first snow. We were lucky to team up with Atte Tanner to make this photoshoot possible, it was great to finally get out there and make this project happen!

-Production team // Juho & Matti

Fall is here and that means the weather is getting much colder and our thoughts are shifting from surfing to skiing…

Last Sunday we went to shoot some photos to an awesome secret location outside Helsinki. We gathered our small crew together and sat down to give thoughts for the winter season 2014 and about this project. Our main idea was to get some photos of the skiers in really inspiring surroundings. A talented photographer, Atte Tanner (http://attetanner.com/) was there to capture the shots. He’ll explain some more technical stuff about the photo shoot at the end of this post.

We are pretty excited about the upcoming winter. Lots of good plans and our motivation is high. Stay tuned for more stuff dropping!

-Skier // Paul

Here’s what our photographer Atte Tanner has to say about the shoot:
I got a really suspicious gaze from the salesman, when I asked for a box of matches to go with my charcoal lighter fluid. It was a chilly September morning in Finland and I’m rather sure the salesman thought I was some kind of barbecue freak, because of my shopping list. In reality there was no BBQ party in sight for me, I was about to go take photos of four professional skiers for their upcoming ski film Nordic Hooligans.

After the awkward moment at the gas station it was time to cram a shopping cart into a already filled car. When this operation was completed it was time to head to the secret location. Our day started with single portraits of all the skiers and ended up with this group shot, that I’ll talk more about in this post!

Lighting
I promised to return the shopping cart to the local store before 6pm, so a group of us took a break to return them. This was a perfect moment to plan and pre-light the scene. I used two large softboxes places next to each other, these acted as the main light for the group shot. This ensured that the light spread was even across all the skiers. On top of this I used a third light source behind the group to light the smoke coming from our smoke machine.

Post-processing
I started the editing process in Lightroom, where I did all the basic edits. This time it included adjusting the exposure a little bit, adding contrast, adding clarity and correcting the perspective. After this the image went to Photoshop.

The first step in Photoshop was to use the Clone Stamp to hide a few distracting spots and the backlight that was peaking through the smoke. Next I used curves to enhance the already existing smoke. I felt this wasn’t enough so I combined smoke from other exposures and finally used a few smoke brushes to add smoke. In my opinion the added smoke improved the composition and gave the group shot more feeling.

The client wanted the final image to be black&white and to have a lot of contrast and noise. I used Silver Efex Pro for the b&w conversion and I chose values that best showed the texture. The final touches were to add plenty of noise and a bit of vignette!

Afterwords
Don’t forget about safety! I think it’s best to break an image apart, especially when it’s a rather complicated group shot like this one. After this you can start solving all the parts individually. In this case I began by deciding the final composition, this involved staging the foreground and test posing the skiers. When I was comfortable I had the composition figured out was it natural to move on to test lighting, with and without the smoke machine. When a good light balance had been found, a few practice poses had been tested we lit the torches and started rocking the scene!